Capt. Samuel Schuyler, a free African-American who came of age in Albany in the late-18th century, was a ship captain and successful entrepreneur of the Hudson River waterfront who became one of the early black community’s leading lights. He was the patriarch of a large family with 11 children, and was revered as a pioneer of a slowly emerging black middle class in the city.

Known to scholars as “the black Schuylers,” the provenance of the surname is unknown and no connection has ever been established with the white Schuylers, the family of Revolutionary War hero Gen. Phillip Schuyler, and the largest slave owner in Albany, with 13 slaves in 1790.

His house at 204 S. Pearl St. (near a Rite Aid Pharmacy today) was dwarfed by the Schuyler Mansion that looms high above on a nearby hill, a striking juxtaposition.

Samuel Schuyler started out as a dock worker, worked his way up to towboat operator and became the owner of a prosperous business he founded, Schuyler Tow Boat Line. Little was known and even less was written about Schuyler, neglected by newspapers and other recorders of the official history of the time because he was a black man. Most of 1,600 people of African ancestry who lived in Albany before 1800 were slaves, the property of an owner with no civil rights. They performed a range of jobs, were bought and sold and bequeathed as property in wills. They were dehumanized and as such were infrequently mentioned in the city’s official documents.

Samuel Schuyler first showed up in Albany records in 1809 as a “free person of color.” He and his sons, who took over the business in the 1820s, also owned and operated a flour and feed store and a coal yard. The family amassed considerable wealth.

The Schuylers were power brokers in the South End, the city’s ethnic melting pot and the locus of the earliest black settlement in Albany after the American Revolution.

The best way to gauge the wealth and prestige of the black Schuylers is to visit their family plot along Middle Ridge Road, Section 59, Lot 66, on the high ground above the chapel with sweeping views. The location is among the most desirable in the cemetery, and in death the black Schuylers tower over the monuments of the adjacent white elite, including Gov. William Marcy and others.

The captain’s monument is a striking, 30-foot-tall obelisk of gray sandstone dominated by a large bas-relief of a ship’s anchor and a letter S in ornate script. The patriarch’s marker is surrounded by more than a dozen stone gravestones for Schuyler descendants.

The Schuylers underscore a story of industriousness, perseverance and overcoming racial discrimination.